Reports, proud muckraking, photos, videos and musings from the veteran LGBT and AIDS human rights advocate Michael Petrelis. Based in San Francisco since 1995.
Contact: MPetrelis_at_AOL_dot_com.
Vote Petrelis for BART Board District 9 in November!

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

NC Gov: No HRC Lobbying Before HB2 Signed into Law

The LGBT wing of the Democratic Party known as the Human Rights Campaign and it's CEO Chad Griffin is fully marshaling all its resources to elect Hillary Clinton president. Even more so than usual, gay Americans cannot count on this organization to effectively look after our interests at the state and local level.

My recent public records request to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory for copies of all correspondence to or from anyone associated with HRC and 36-pages of responsive records were produced and can be read here.

No one from HRC wrote to the governor before he signed the bathroom bill HB2 on March 23, lobbying him to reject the hateful bill.

When HRC executives got around to writing McCrory in Raleigh starting on April 6, they emailed the same note and it said nothing about North Carolina or anything specific about HB2. And to think McCrory falsely claimed HRC was more powerful than the NRA!

Longtime global and LGBT leader Melanie Nathan of Marin County, California, broaches important issues related to HRC executives and how they spend their working days, learning about their schedules:

"If you look at the timing of when this all occurred in March and April I recommend HRC account to the community for its staff's time and locations around the time when this NC Bill went down.

"Judging from what I am seeing on TV and social media, HRC has deployed resources to follow and promote Hillary Clinton's campaign.

"I wonder if there is a way to measure HRC's seemingly sluggish reaction and relationship to the events in NC against the resources possibly diverted to campaign for Clinton?"

Thanks, Melanie, for speaking up!

We need transparency from Chad Griffin and all of HRC about how they allocate organizational resources and staffing deployments, and we need full disclosure from them regarding exactly what the heck they were doing before North Carolina enacted the anti-trans and anti-LGBT bathroom and misnamed privacy bill.